Users of mobile telecommunications devices can download content for their devices such as ring tones, screen savers, games, and other applications. These items might reside on computing equipment maintained by a provider of the telecommunications service. Alternatively, the telecommunications provider might wish to make content provided by third parties available to its customers. As used herein, the term ‘content provider’ can refer to either a telecommunications provider providing its own content or a third party making its content available to customers of a telecommunications provider.
Under current procedures for a content provider making content available to customers, the content provider might load the content into a content catalog, such as an electronic media application for presenting the offerings of the provider. The catalog would be accessible to customers through their mobile telecommunications devices so that customers could download content from the catalog to their mobile telecommunications devices (also known as handsets).
A content provider might wish to restrict access to its content so that only legitimate customers are allowed to download content. Therefore, it might be desirable to authenticate customers who attempt to download content to ensure that the customers are allowed to receive the content. Many commercially available authentication systems, such as public key infrastructure (PKI), require a great deal of computing capacity and memory. Such systems typically cannot be efficiently implemented on mobile telecommunications devices where computing capacity and memory might be limited.